This invention relates to a high voltage discharge power source used to provide power to high frequency electronic circuits or systems, and particularly to electron guns providing ion plasma.
The traditional method of generating a gas discharge is simply to place a current limiting ballast resistor in series with the gas tube and then apply a large voltage across the combination of gas tube and ballast resistor.
For laser amplifier use it is desired to form a continuous uniform discharge over a one meter predetermined length of a gas discharge tube having a confined gas therein. The necessary driving voltage in prior art discharge devices becomes enormous; in the order of 375 kv. However, the single discharge can be broken into several shorter lower voltage discharge paths, but such shorter lower voltage discharge paths entails the use of independent isolated voltage sources. For a practical system the costs for more than two sections of such shorter lower voltage discharge paths becomes economically prohibitive.
Another prior art alternative is the use of additional ballast resistors to stabilize the discharge from a single voltage source. However, such method necessarily results in dead spaces between discharge elements. With dead spaces between anodes and/or cathodes, there is no assurance that a discharge current will ignite between adjacent discharge branches in the prior art discharge methods. Although straight-forward in concept, such prior art method does not meet the requirements to eliminate the dead spaces.
Furthermore, additional disadvantages of the prior art is that discharges occurring in the low current region reveals that ordinary ballast circuits using resistors become unstable when the discharges operate in such low current regions.
Insofar as the electron gun application of this invention, the prior art harbors the same disadvantages as stated above. In addition, such prior art cannot utilize unshielded support metallic members, since such support members in discharge path will result in intercepting naturally orbiting electrons resulting in a marked decrease in efficiency.
A specific example of prior art electron gun is shown in French Pat. No. 2,204,882 not embodying sources and sinks, having magnetic means of ionization of gas as well as employing both an electron emission filament and cathode with similar obvious disadvantages hereinabove stated.